Labor Resource Center Databases and Research

Links to Databases/Data Resources

Launched in March 2013, the National Census of Writing seeks to provide a data-based landscape of writing instruction at two- and four-year public and not-for-profit institutions of higher education in the United States. Despite numerous calls for empirical data to ground the design and administration of writing programs and writing centers, this is the first comprehensive study of its kind and covers the following sections:

From the Introduction: "In Fall 2017, the Writing Program Administration Graduate Organization (WPA-GO) Labor Taskforce surveyed 344 Graduate Student Instructors (GSI) of writing from 37 states in the United States, including 74 master's-level GSIs, 36 MFA-level GSIs, and 234 PhD-level GSI's. We asked about their perceptions of labor conditions in their writing programs--including salary, benefits, and leave policies. Thus, all data featured in this report is self-reported. In this brief report, we highlight the most urgent findings of the study as well as individual GSI responses to the questions. Our hope is that this report will spark conversations about the labor conditions of GSIs."

Originally a listserv query by Jill Dahlman at the University of North Alabama, this crowdsourced database contains information on departments/programs that compensation adjunct (broadly defined) faculty for participating in orientation/professional development (i.e., beyond teaching) activities. If you want to contribute information about your own program, you can add it directly to the spreadsheet, or you can send it to Jill via email.

This link goes directly to the CAW page that presents results of several studies they’ve conducted, most notably the 2012 “Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members” survey. There’s also a long list of other research reports that allow users to pull out data by disciplines, different kinds of job statuses, and so on.

The Crowdsourced Spreadsheet of Postsecondary Writing Course Caps has been assembled by synthesizing the previous available information, on CompPile (which was a static webpage) with an editable google doc that allows visitors to add their own institutional information to it. It is recommended that users download the spreadsheet if they plan to manipulate or sort the information. The spreadsheet is managed by Holly Hassel (holly.hassel@ndsu.edu).

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The Center for the Study of Academic Labor (CSAL) promotes research and scholarship on the transformation of academic labor in higher education, including but not limited to scholarship on contingency and tenure. For more information, visit our site information page or contact us at: